CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CONNECTICUT, AGE TWENTY-FIVE
There was a car in the driveway, parked behind Luke's motorcycle. I leaned my head back against the car seat, squeezing my eyes shut and sighing, already dreading whatever sights and sounds of transient passion might be awaiting me on the other side of the door.
I could just wait here until she's gone.
Yeah, I could, but God only knows how long that's gonna take, and I need to throw a load of laundry in before I go to sleep.
Begrudgingly, I released another sigh and climbed out of the car. If I'd known Luke had company, I would’ve asked Marie—the woman who I’d just slept with—if I could hang out for a while. Maybe used her shower or watched TV for a few hours until I could be certain Luke had passed out. But that also would've been ridiculous, and I knew it, yet it still felt preferred over hearing my older brother yelling for his bedmate to “take it all.”
“Great,” I grumbled, closing the door behind me.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” a woman chanted loudly from upstairs, and I rolled my eyes as I slowly began to ascend. “You're so good. Oh God, you're gonna … oh God … you … GOD!”
I rolled my eyes to the paint chipping off the ceiling. “Oh, that's exactly what he needs. To think he's God .”
I moved my feet quickly up the stairs, knowing there was no reason to be quiet. Neither of them would hear me over the noise they were making, and, yeah, maybe I was a little jealous of that when the woman I’d just left couldn't reach her orgasm and simply told me “not to worry about it.”
“Shit, baby,” my brother groaned as I reached the landing. “You take that dick so fucking good.”
She actually screamed in response, and … Jesus, was she crying ? “God, o-oh God, oh God …”
At the end of the hallway, the light shone from beneath my brother's door. I was at least grateful he'd had the foresight to close it this time as I headed in that direction, walking past my room and hanging a right into the bathroom.
I shut the door as she let out another scream, accompanied by my brother's telltale primal shout, like he was heading out to hunt with his fellow tribesmen. I rolled my eyes and shook my head as I unzipped my jeans and used the bathroom. I never knew if Luke's ability to not give a shit was admirable or not. I'd been trying to decide for ten years now, and—
My lips parted with a surge of overpowering distress as the stream slowed.
Ten. Years?
It had been ten years since my parents had left the house and never returned. Ten years since I'd heard their voices, ten years since I'd listened to them perish in a fiery crash. God, how had I allowed this day to arrive without hardly thinking about what it was? How had I managed to have sex—to come —without once remembering that my parents hadn't been given the chance to watch me grow up?
I tucked myself back into my jeans and flushed the toilet, moving now in a dreamlike haze as the events of that night rolled in like they'd happened yesterday and not a decade ago. The sound of my mother's cries. The crunching, twisting metal. The nothingness that followed. The uncontrolled sobs that had racked my body as Luke pried the phone from my whitened knuckles.
Pain pricked the backs of my eyes as I stared ahead at my reflection in the broken mirror. My hair was longer now, brushing the tops of my shoulders. My beard had filled in. My dark eyes wore the circles of someone overtired and overworked. I'd reached adulthood somehow without the guidance of my father and the comfort of my mother, and still, in this moment, I felt so helpless and unsure of what the hell to do next.
How the hell was I supposed to get through the next ten years without them? How the hell was I supposed to get through the rest of my life?
I told myself that at least I had Luke. At least we had each other, for whatever it was worth, but I knew Mom and Dad wouldn't have approved of our fumble through the past ten years. Alcoholism. Sexual encounters with a myriad of random women. Motorcycles. Allowing the house to go straight to hell.
They hadn't taught us enough, I decided angrily, bitterly. They hadn't taught us how to survive like grown-ups in a world that expected too much from us. They hadn't taught us how to cope with the bullshit trauma life would inevitably throw at us.
It's not their fault.
I shook my head at my reflection and pulled back a loud sniffle. No, it wasn't their fault for dying. But it was their fault for coddling me too much, for not coddling Luke enough. For keeping me hidden beneath their shelter and not giving a shit about anything he did in his spare time.
Stop .
I blew out my breath and nodded. Anger never led to anywhere good, and everything Mom and Dad had done, they'd done out of love. They'd always done what they thought to be right, and wasn't that all any of us were doing?
After splashing some cool water on my face, I exhaled once more and turned to leave the bathroom when the door flew open to reveal my brother and a woman I didn't recognize.
Both of them grinning and laughing.
Both of them naked.
“Shit,” I uttered as my hand quickly clapped over my eyes. I'd seen Luke in the nude plenty of times, but I didn't need to know the size and shape of this woman's boobs before knowing her name.
“Oh, hey, man,” Luke said casually, neither of them bothering to move out of the way. “I didn't know you were home.”
“Who's this?” the woman asked, her voice still breathless from the exertion. “You didn't tell me you had a roommate. He could've joined—”
I shook my head rapidly. “Nope. Not going there.”
Luke laughed boisterously. “Charlie's my little brother.”
“Well, he's cute. I like his hair—”
I retreated back into the bathroom as I felt her fingers touch the ends of my hair, still a mess from being in someone else’s bed not even an hour ago.
“Look, I just wanna get back to my room, and then you guys can do whatever—”
“I thought you had a date,” Luke said, his voice full of concern and question. “With, uh, Bethany? Right?”
“Marie.”
“Right.” His hand hit something—the wall maybe. “Marie. That's it. What happened? You good?”
That was just like Luke. He might've been a sex-crazed idiot who made shitty choices when it came to addictions and money and women, but he always cared about me. He always put me first. Even when he was standing naked in the hallway with a woman I didn't know, keeping me from fleeing to close myself behind my bedroom door.
I sighed. “We can talk la—”
“Nah, we're good. You can tell me now. What's up?”
Pressing my lips into a tight line, I blew out an exasperated breath through my nose, then relented and said, “She broke it off.”
“ What ?” he asked, like he could hardly believe it. “The fuck, man! I swear to God, these freakin' women.”
“Hey!” the nameless woman cried, and I heard a hand hit flesh. She must've slapped him.
“Sorry, babe. Not you.”
I rolled my eyes behind my palm. I knew my brother, and I knew there was little chance of him ever seeing her again.
“Luke, I really just wanna get to my room, okay? So, if you could just move—”
“Oh, right. Yeah, sure. Okay. Well, listen, once Samantha—”
“Sarah,” she corrected with a giggle.
“Right, sorry. Sarah.” Luke cleared his throat, and I tried to bite back a smile. “Once Sarah here goes home, we can talk, all right? If you want, I mean.”
“Sure,” I said, nodding.
Then, there was the shuffling of feet against the hallway carpet, and I quickly made my escape. I hurried to my room, moving even faster past my parents' vaulted bedroom, and shut my door. Then, I grabbed my sketchbook and marker and turned on my music, just in time to block out the sound of Sarah screaming in the shower.
***
Luke let himself into my room a little over an hour later, and this time, thank God, he was dressed.
“Hey,” he said, waltzing in like he owned the place.
I glanced up from the drawing I’d been working on to watch as he crossed his arms and flopped onto my bed, stomach down.
“Hey.”
“Samantha left.”
“Her name was Sarah,” I corrected, looking back down to continue my scribbling.
“Shit, why can’t I remember that?”
I knew why. The guy had been hooking up with a new girl every week for the past couple of years, or so it seemed. Sooner or later, naturally, they’d started to blur together. Names and the experiences tied to them had to eventually become meaningless.
It was sad, and no matter how much time had passed since Melanie had left, I couldn’t help but think, It wasn’t supposed to be like this .
For either of us.
“But anyway”—the back of his hand slapped my leg—“what happened with that chick you were seeing?”
“I told you,” I replied, not bothering to look up now as my marker moved across the paper in fluid strokes. “She broke it off.”
“Yeah, I got it, but why?”
I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “She said I was a nice guy, but it wasn’t working out.”
Through the corner of my eye, I watched Luke’s mouth press firmly into a terse line as his eyes dropped to the plaid blanket I'd been using for nearly a decade. I wondered if his thoughts mirrored mine—that it was never meant to be this way. That we weren’t supposed to be perpetual bachelors in our mid-slash-late-twenties without any hope of that changing anytime soon.
“Her loss,” he finally grumbled after a handful of seconds passed.
“I think …” The felt tip stopped moving against the paper as I stared at the rainy scene I’d drawn. The car driving away on a wet street, the expanse of road ahead leading nowhere. “I think maybe I’m the problem.”
Luke’s gaze swung to mine. “What? Why the hell would you think that?”
“Come on, man. I know I come on strong, and I know I’m … you know—”
“Weird as fuck?”
My eyes answered first with a slow blink. “Thank you for that. Yeah, I mean, maybe I’m just … a lot to handle or something. I don’t know. I'm not exactly normal. None of this shit is.”
“None of what shit?”
I lifted my hand to gesture at the ceiling. At the house. At the life we kept locked inside. “This!” I exclaimed in a huff of exasperation, already on the edge of spiraling.
He lifted a brow. “You mean, the house?”
“I mean, everything!” That same hand swept over the entire room, making sure to pass over him in the process.
He reared his head back as his brow furrowed. “What's wrong with everything? Wait, are you talking about me ?”
That hand now pressed to my forehead, my fingers rubbing against my brows. “No … I … I don't fucking know.” I dropped my hand to the pad in my lap and dragged my eyes back to my brother's. “You're gonna tell me you're just fine with life? You're happy?”
Luke scoffed like it was the most asinine question I could've asked. “Of course I'm not happy, Charlie.”
My mouth fell open to reply, only to close again. Had I really believed he was content to do what he'd been doing for the past couple of years?
“But here's the thing about me,” he continued, leveling me with a stern glare. “I don’t need to be happy. I just need to get from one day to the next, and that's exactly what I'm doing. I need to eat, I need to work, I need to sleep, and I need to fuck. That's what I need to get by.”
“And you're good with that?” I asked as my eyes narrowed with skepticism.
His gaze shifted from mine to the comforter. “Never said I was good with it, but it's what I have. And anyway, this isn't about me right now. We're talking about you. If you need more than that, if you want more than that, then fucking get it, man. Don't sit there, getting all mopey, and act like this”—he lifted his hand toward the ceiling in a mock gesture—“is holding you back. If you want things to change, then fucking change it. And just because you struck out with this chick doesn't mean the right one won't come along eventually. Jesus fuck, Charlie. You're twenty-five, not … fucking … forty or some shit.”
It had been my choice to hold myself back and only look out for my brother. To devote my nights to cooking dinner and my mornings to waking him up, out of fear that he wouldn't do either himself.
But he would've done the same for me, wouldn't he?
Hadn't he done it just by not ditching me with our grandmother when we were teenagers?
I pushed past my questioning brain to say, “You’re assuming there is a right one.”
He nodded encouragingly, glaring at me like I'd lost my mind. “Uh, yeah, idiot. There is. So, don’t go thinking you need to change everything for these women, okay? Change if you want to, but not for them. ‘Cause the right one’s gonna come along one day and fuckin’ love that you wanna get married after a couple of dates.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at that. “I didn’t ask Marie to marry me.”
“Yeah, but with the right one, you fucking would, and you know it.”
He was teasing, but somehow, somewhere deep in the pit of my rolling gut, I knew he was probably right.
“And she’ll go running for the fucking hills.”
“Man, are you kidding? The right chick’s gonna be like, Yes, Charlie, I will be your bride of Frankenstein. Let me just go sew myself a dress made from the skin of my victims, and I’ll meet you down at the courthouse ,” he said in a mocking, high-pitched tone.
“You’re an asshole,” I said, but I was laughing and feeling better somehow, lighter. Grateful that he had barged into my room and insisted on talking.
“Ah, there’s that smile I love.” He reached out to clip his knuckles against my cheek. “You’re gonna be fine. I’m telling you. Like, ten, fifteen years from now, you’re gonna look back on this little bitch moment. And then you’re gonna look at your wife, Morticia, and your three freaky little kids and think, Damn, Luke was right … again .”
“Oh, yeah, you think so? And where the hell are you gonna be?” I looked at him with an incredulous, disbelieving cock of my brow while also hoping that he was right despite my devotion to him and keeping what was left of this family together.
Luke smirked with a faraway look glinting in his eye as he lifted one shoulder in a shrug before swinging his gaze back to mine with a laughing, forced smile. “I dunno, man. At this point, I'll just be lucky if I'm not dead or in prison.”